Page 21 of Pretty Dead Things

“Honey, what are these?” I ask, but I already know. I’m holding a bottle of Dry XT. Its label is fluorescent blue with metallic silver text:ALL-NATURAL DIURETIC.

This is exactly what I was afraid of. I already know what Miss Lone Star Princess can do to a group of teens. How it can turn them ugly and feral. I already know, because it happened to me.

And I won’t let it happen to my little girl. Not over my dead body.

CHAPTER SEVENTEENCAT

That interaction with Abel Sherman today has put me on edge.

I keep twisting the locks, checking that the security system is armed, peering between the blinds by the front door. Parked at the curb just outside the model home, a white Chevy Silverado idles in the dark. It’s been there twenty minutes now.

The old Cat would march right out there, knock on the window, and ask them what the hell they were doing. Instead, I take out my phone and call Sheriff Ryan.

“Everything all right, darling?” he asks.

I pause, watching the truck, wondering if I was too quick to call him. There are a million innocent reasons that truck might be there. It could be a mom driving her infant around because it’s the only way she can get her to sleep. Could be teenagers making out.

“It’s probably nothing,” I say.

Then the Silverado’s headlights come on and it begins to pull away. I watch its taillights fade off into the night.

On the phone, I can hear the sheriff’s turn signal. I drop the blinds back into place and make my voice as cheery as possible. “I was just wondering if we were going to see you at the Miss Lone Star orientation tomorrow.” I make my way into the living room.

“Is everything all right there at the model home?” he asks.

“Of course. Nothing stirring but the breeze.”

The click-click-click of his signal stops, and I drop my shouldersdown my back. When I hang up, I let out a long sigh and toss my phone onto the sofa. My pulse is still up. I need to center myself, so I push aside the coffee table in the living room and roll out my yoga mat, pull up a YouTube video and settle into child’s pose. I focus on my breath.

During the worst of my addiction, I couldn’t trust my senses. I was a seismograph, picking up tremors no one else could feel. Every whisper in public was about me. Every sideways glance held a hidden meaning. A man on the street looking at his phone was actually taking photos of me. The hum of the refrigerator sounded like voices. There was so much noise inside my head. I felt an incessant itch at my neck. Sometimes, I’d scratch it bloody.

Drug-induced psychosis, a doctor diagnosed once when the cops brought me to the hospital after I’d been found wandering an apartment complex, knocking on doors, trying to warn others about the man who was following me.

With sobriety, the mind snaps back. Almost. My mind is something like a Slinky stretched out just a little too far. Sure, it coils back, still looks like a Slinky—if you hold it together. AA meetings, sponsor check-ins, routines, yoga—I’m doing my best to hold it together.

I move through the vinyasa flow, from warrior one to warrior two, paying attention to the minute adjustments of my muscles when I hear a sound from outside. I keep my feet in position as I reach for the remote, pause the TV. The instructor’s gentle drone stops. So does the ambient soundtrack beneath. The house is silent, and I listen.

Another sound. A voice, maybe. An animal?

I pick up my phone from the couch and return to the window. The street is empty. The trees shiver in the wind.

I can’t call the sheriff again. Not with another false alarm. I’ll sound paranoid. Delusional? He’ll worry. He’ll ask Melanie how I’m doing. He’ll tell Mark to keep an eye on me. Everyone, all these people who love me, will be put on alert. And Olivia will feel it,even if no one says anything to her directly. She’ll pick up on the vibrations, the collective concern, and whatever guard she dropped, she’ll zip right back up, the way you zip a jacket up to your chin to keep out the cold, to protect yourself.

I grab a long cardigan from the office and slide my feet into rubber-soled slippers, unlock the door, and step out into the night. I stop where the walkway meets the sidewalk. The street is scattered with gravel and the cut-off end of a PVC pipe, litter from today’s construction. Leaves rustle. A barred owl’s hoot reverberates through the trees—a low, stuttering sound like an engine that won’t turn over. And beneath it all, I hear the murmur of voices.

I look back to the house, the windows warm with light, and then down the road, the construction site in shadows, a still and silent backhoe-turned-silhouette, the shape of something with claws.

I check my phone. It’s not even 10PM. I shake off the silly edge of fear and start walking toward the sounds, past the single lamppost outside the model home, leaving the safety of its circle of light. Beyond it, the night opens wide, pale with moonlight and thin clouds drifting past. I pull my sweater tight. The paved road devolves into dirt, and as I get closer, I catch words disembodied from their sentences, “over here,” “a long time.”

But because of the open space, the nooks between clusters of trees, the way echoes bounce off limestone, and the rushing water of the river, I keep stopping, keep turning my head to determine which direction I should be going. The voices sound like they are coming from far away but also somehow just over my shoulder.

The corner lot up ahead has already been sold, and construction started on the grand house that will soon overlook The Hollow. That’s where the sounds are coming from, I realize, down by the water, near the mouth of the cave. I pause, scratch absently at that irritated spot on my neck, just under my jawline, where my heartbeat pulses below my ear. The wind opens and closes the thin plastic door of the port-a-potty by the construction trailer with an uneasy clank, clank, clank.

I pick my way onto the property, past a bulldozer, a pallet of wood. The ground is soft, overturned soil mixed with chunks of stone, chewed-up clumps of grass, giving way to woods that slope down to the river.

I can hear them now more clearly as I enter the shadows, and from my vantage on the hill, I spot them through breaks in the trees. Three teenage boys in the water, their inner tubes pulled up on the bank. One, lanky with a mop of loose curls, sits on the rocky ledge, legs dangling in the water. Another, shirtless and leanly muscled, stretches out in his tube, the brim of his ball cap hiding his face. The third, husky and broad shouldered, treads water.

It’s been twenty-five years since anyone floated this part of the river. Since Isabelle Whitmore vanished.